Projects

CO/ALIGN · 2026–

Urban Mobility Transitions through Coalitions: Leveraging and Upscaling Active Citizenship in Multi-level Governance

Role

Principal Investigator, UBB team

Funding

Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) Partnership, Call 2024, 15-minute City pathway; national funding UEFISCDI, PNCDI IV, contract 153/01.01.2026

Coordinator

Ghent University

CO/ALIGN studies how coalitions of civil society organisations, city governments and knowledge institutions advance 15-minute-city mobility transitions and scale them up from the street and neighbourhood level. The consortium compares Antwerp, London, Turin, Cluj-Napoca and Barcelona. The UBB team leads the Deep Dives work package (WP3) and the Cluj Living Lab, in partnership with Clujul Sustenabil, the Municipality of Cluj-Napoca and Metapolis.

NetZeroCities Pilot City · 2023–2025

Blueprint for Net-Zero Apartment-block Neighbourhoods

Role

Project director, Babeș-Bolyai University

Funding

NetZeroCities Pilot Cities Programme, EU Horizon 2020 (grant agreement 101036519); UBB contract 701463/09.08.2023

Lead partner

Municipality of Cluj-Napoca

Cluj-Napoca’s pilot activity in the EU Cities Mission tests how high-density apartment-block neighbourhoods can become climate-neutral districts, with Mănăștur as the pilot neighbourhood. The local consortium combines behavioural, perception and modelling analysis, urban planning toolkits for multi-apartment neighbourhoods and the architecture of a climate-neutrality digital twin.

Cluj Future of Work · 2019–2022

Cluj Future of Work: Jobs and Skills in the Local Economy

Role

Project director, Babeș-Bolyai University

Funding

Urban Innovative Actions, European Regional Development Fund

Lead partner

Municipality of Cluj-Napoca, with the Cluj Cultural Centre

Cluj Future of Work addressed the exposure of the local economy to automation and emerging technologies through actions for groups ranging from entrepreneurs in the cultural and creative industries to the Roma community of Pata Rât. It was the first project in Eastern Europe funded by the Urban Innovative Actions programme of the European Commission.

RoTech · 2018–2020

Strategic Cooperative Networks: Exploring the Cluj Information Technology Networks

Role

Project director (PI)

Team

Norbert Petrovici, Neda Deneva-Faje, Ionuț Földes, Anca Chiș

Funding

UEFISCDI, PN-III Young Independent Research Teams, PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-1691, contract 76/02.05.2018

Host

Babeș-Bolyai University

RoTech studied Romania’s position in the international IT market through the Cluj IT sector, in a national industry where about three quarters of activity consists of outsourced work. The project mapped the local and international networks in which Cluj firms are embedded, the regulatory framework of the sector and the resources firms use to negotiate complex projects and move up global value chains.

The team combined firm-level accounting data, 57 interviews with IT employees from programmers to company owners, 25 interviews with decision-makers in public administration, IT, the creative industries and furniture manufacturing, and a telephone survey of 873 adults representative of Cluj-Napoca and its metropolitan area. The analyses covered the automation and digitalisation of work in the Cluj Metropolitan Area, employability narratives and employee leasing in IT firms, and the consumption geography of middle-class fractions, traced through coffee-shop preferences. Outputs include Petrovici & Deneva-Faje (2020) in Studia UBB Sociologia, Petrovici & Faje (2019) in Hipsteri, bobos și clase creative and Földes (2019) in the Romanian Journal of Population Studies.